TRIPOLI, Lebanon (AP) – Thousands of people fled a crowded refugee camp Tuesday night during a break in three straight days of clashes between Lebanese troops and Islamic militants holed up inside, Associated Press reporters at the scene said.

AP reporters at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp said the massive exodus began at about 9 p.m. during the lull in the fighting between the Lebanese army and the Fatah Islam militant group of Sunni Muslims.

U.N. relief officials in another camp located a few miles to the south of Tripoli said they expected 10,000 Palestinian Arab refugees from Nahr el-Bared to arrive through the night.

AP Television News video from Nahr el-Bared earlier in the afternoon showed women clutching children and piling up in pickup trucks, some waving white flags, as they tried to leave the partially destroyed camp. Others fled on foot, and ambulances could be seen evacuating the wounded.

Earlier, a U.N. convoy carrying relief supplies was hit during the fighting.

The Lebanese army initially stopped the convoy of six trucks from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which aids Palestinians, from entering the camp. The convoy was later allowed in during the brief cease-fire.

Fierce fighting erupted Sunday between the Lebanese military and the Fatah Islam group, and more than 50 combatants have been killed in nearly continuous gunbattles.

Ibrahim Issa Dawoud, 42, fled the camp with his wife and six children in the truce. “We thought this was our last chance because they will bulldoze the camp. That is why we took the risk and fled,” the taxi driver said.

“We hid in a mosque for three days,” he said as his children aged between 3 and 13, ate chips. “Even the cemetery was bombarded and the skeletons were uprooted.”

Refugees were seen raising white towels from windows and even waving white plastic bags. Boys carried babies, and a young boy and a woman helped an elderly woman as cars sped past carrying more refugees.

Many of the packed cars had their windows blasted from the fighting.

Video showed streets littered with damaged vehicles, shards of glass and rubble from destroyed buildings, some in flames after the shelling.

“There are a lot of dead and wounded in the houses, our homes are being destroyed on our heads,” said a young refugee woman in a blue veil.

A man angrily interrupted her. “There’s been a massacre, I witnessed it,” said the man. He said he had seen 10 civilians killed in one room. “Six shells fell on us, the bodies were cut to pieces,” he said.

Their stories could not be immediately corroborated. No official casualty toll of civilians could be established Tuesday because of the limited access to Nahr el-Bared camp, where fierce gunbattles sporadically erupted through the day.

The Lebanese Red Cross said it had treated 60 wounded and sick and evacuated the remains of 32 people killed in the Tripoli area since fighting began on Sunday.

The Red Cross statement, which was issued by the International Red Cross Committee in Geneva, did not specify whether the casualties were combatants or civilians.

The UNRWA aid official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said the relief convoy was hit and there was at least one casualty.

Al-Arabiya satellite television reported four civilians were killed in the incident. The UNRWA official said there were 15 civilian casualties but did not give a breakdown of dead and wounded. There was no official confirmation of either report.

The UNRWA official said earlier that he had reports dozens of buildings in the camp had been destroyed with residents trapped in the rubble.

Lebanese media reported that some 200 Palestinians in Nahr el-Bared demonstrated against Fatah Islam, asking them to leave the refugee camp.

Overnight, the Lebanese government ordered the army to finish off the militants who have set up in the camp, where 31,000 Palestinian refugees live on the outskirts of the northern port of Tripoli.

Black smoke billowed from the area earlier Tuesday amid artillery and machine gun exchanges between troops and militants. Lebanese troops skirmished with Fatah Islam fighters, trying to seize militant positions on the outskirts of the camp.

“There are dead and wounded on the road, inside the camp,” screamed a Lebanese woman, Amina Alameddine, who ran weeping from her home on the edge of the camp. She fled with her daughter and four other relatives after Fatah Islam fighters started shooting at the army from the roof of her house.

At the same time, Lebanese troops sought to flush out fighters hiding in Tripoli. Soldiers raided a building where Fatah Islam militants were believed to be hiding out, blasting an apartment with grenades, gunfire and tear gas.

They found no one in the apartment. As they pursued a militant hours later, he blew himself up by detonating an explosives belt rather than surrendering. None of the troops was injured.

Dozens of refugees angered by the assault on Nahr el-Bared burned tires in protest in the southern camp of Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian camp. Protesters also burned tires in Rashidiyeh camp, farther south.

The protests raised the specter that Palestinians in Lebanon’s 11 other refugee camps could rise up in anger over the assault on Nahr el-Bared. The overcrowded camps – housing more than 215,000 refugees, out of a total of 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon – are also home to many armed Palestinian factions who often battle each other and have seen a rising number of Islamic extremists.

Lebanese authorities do not enter the camps under a nearly 40-year-old agreement with the Palestinians.

The government of Prime Minister Fuad Saniora appeared determined to pursue Fatah Islam. Lebanon’s Cabinet late Monday authorized the army to step up its campaign and “end the terrorist phenomenon that is alien to the values and nature of the Palestinian people,” Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said.

The Bush administration reaffirmed its support for Saniora’s government Tuesday and indicated it suspected Syrian involvement.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said the Fatah Islam militants want to disrupt the nation’s security and distract international attention from a U.N. effort to establish a special tribunal try suspects in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut.

America “will not tolerate attempts by Syria, terrorist groups or any others to delay or derail Lebanon’s efforts to solidify its sovereignty or seek justice in the Hariri case,” Mr. Snow said.

Lebanese security officials accuse Syria of backing Fatah Islam to disrupt Lebanon. The charges are denied by Syria, which controlled Lebanon until 2005 when its troops were forced to withdraw from the country following Hariri’s assassination.

The fighting, Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the 1975-90 civil war, has added yet another layer of instability to an uneasy balancing act among numerous sects and factions vying for power. Saniora’s government already faces a domestic political crisis, with the opposition led by Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah demanding its removal.

Major Palestinian factions have distanced themselves from Fatah Islam, which arose here last year and touts itself as a Palestinian liberation movement. But many view it as a nascent branch of al-Qaida-style terrorism with ambitions of carrying out attacks around the region.

The group’s leader, Palestinian Shaker al-Absi, has been linked to the former head of al-Qaida in Iraq and is accused in the 2002 assassination of an Ameircan diplomat in Jordan. He moved into Nahr el-Bared last fall after being expelled from Syria, where he was in custody.

Since then, he is believed to have recruited about 100 fighters, including militants from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other Arab countries, and he has said he follows the ideology of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Among the militants killed Sunday was a man suspected in a plot to bomb trains in Germany last year, according to Lebanese security officials.

The Arab League condemned the “criminal and terrorist acts” committed by Fatah Islam and gave its “total support for the efforts exerted by the Lebanese government and army to assert security and stability.”

The Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah – Lebanon’s strongest militant group and the main opposition to the government – has so far been backing the army in its confrontation with the Sunni radicals.

The Hezbollah stance highlights the complex tensions among Lebanon’s various factions and militant groups. Hezbollah, as a Shiite Muslim group, is a sworn ideological and religious enemy of groups like the Sunni Muslim Fatah Islam.